Investigating reuse markets: recyclers hope to strengthen export markets through a new electronics association

Recycling Today, Jan, 2005 by Robin Ingenthron

There is always a temptation to mix bad, un-repairable and outdated monitors into loads of repairable monitors. Several overseas buyers have approached WR3A to complain about less scrupulous U.S. monitor resellers.

"If I want 50,000 monitors per month, it seems I have no choice but to buy 80,000 monitors per month," says one supplier, who asks not to be identified. "They get free disposal, we get poison." Another used CRT broker came to visit WR3A from Taipei in November, carrying dozens of photos of CRTs imported from Los Angeles, which were "simply garbage," the broker says. "We called to complain, and all they said is, 'So, don't pay us.'"

Some larger Chinese semi-knockdown (SKD) makers have given up on sourcing enough used CRTs and have begun using new LCD screens for their TV "kits."

Some new equipment manufacturers, especially in China, have also become concerned at the growth and scale of the refurbished market and are trying to use environmental fears to cut off the supply of CRTs for refurbishment.

How big a threat are refurbishers to the new TV and monitor makers? It does not pay to underestimate the secondary market. In November, the Wall Street Journal profiled Lu Guanqiu, one of China's wealthiest men and founder and chairman of Wanxiang Group Co., that country's biggest auto-parts supplier. Wanxiang Group had $1.8 billion in sales last year and $3 billion are expected this year.

According to the Journal, when Guanqiu, his wife and five others pooled $500 to start a tractor-repair shop in rural China in the late 1960s, local officials laughed at their efforts. Now OEMs take rapidly growing refurbishment businesses more seriously.

One group opposed to export for refurbishment is the Anti-Gray Market Alliance, recently renamed as the Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement (www.agmaglobal.org). The group's sponsors include several electronics companies that are alarmed to see their own used products being refurbished by repair people so competently that they rival their new products.

CONSUMERS. At a one-day event in Concord, N.H., run by American Retroworks Inc., two participants bringing in old PCs had widely divergent ideas of the used market value of their units. One person brought in a 17-inch working monitor, but wanted to be assured that it would be destroyed by the recycling process rather than be reused. Another objected to paying for the recycling of his 1989 school computers because "they still work as well as the day we bought them."

Clearly, generators are not in a position to tell which monitors are for reuse and which are best scrapped domestically. The challenge is for electronics recycling companies to explain reuse and repairability without being accused of exporting toxics overseas.

Even WR3A has considered that in the long term CRT reuse will become an energy issue ... LCDs use less power and contribute less to greenhouse gases. However, so long as new CRTs are being made (with 15-year life expectancies), refurbishment seems a better way to meet demand than mining and smelting new tubes.